Learning To Sew on a Button by Reading a Procedural Text. Technical Report No. 543.

Burnham, Catherine A.; Anderson, Thomas H.

Two studies examined the validity of a model of procedural document processing, and the relationships among document features, reader characteristics, and successful completion of a button-sewing task. The first study tested three information sources. Subjects were 12 seventh-grade, 12 tenth-grade, and 12 adult students who used 2 commercially published texts and 1 experimental text. The experimental text helped older subjects perform better; adult students performed best overall. The second study tested instructions written to encourage more self-testing and self-correcting. Subjects were 105 high school students. Amounts of self-correcting were increased, but overall button-sewing quality did not improve significantly. Effects of the experimental text features were not significant, but analyses of regression performed on the without-instruction button-sewing scores, sewing improvement scores, sewing time, and number of corrections revealed significant effects from gender, grade level, reading ability, coordination, prior experience, and sewing time. (Five figures of data are included; the button-sewing texts, rating scales, and 112 references are attached.) (Author/RS)